Body In The Belfry ff-1

by Katherine Hall Page

  “Oh, Faith, I hope you don't mind. I didn 't want the kids to see me like this. Of course they don't want to go to school, so I can't leave them long. What are we going to do ? "

  “Have something to eat first and then we'll try to figure it out." It was Faith's credo. "I assume you have a lawyer, right ? "

  “Lawyers! Yes, we have a lawyer and he's on his way." Pix was starting to hiccup, but it didn't lessen the emotional impact of her words, "Faith, this is all my fault ! "

  “Now don't tell me you were having an affair with Cindy, too," said Faith, hoping to inject a little humor in the situation. She poured some coffee into two mugs, adding a liberal dose of brandy to Pix's. She cut some thick slices of cinnamon bread, buttered them, and sat down.

  Pix raised her head from the table where she had collapsed. "Believe me, Faith, if it would have kept Sam from having one with her, I would have. The little slut. It makes me nauseous to think of it.”

  She took a large swallow of coffee and continued. "I knew Sam was having an affair and I figured I'd just wait it out. You know how hard he took turning forty. You were at the party.”

  Faith remembered. The tight little smile and forced laughter Sam had displayed as he opened his "gifts"—bottles of Geritol, Playboy calendars, all singularly tasteless, in her opinion. Then there were all the jokes about getting it up—someone had even given him a small toy crane with a long pointless poem about how to use it and when. Somebody else had presented Pix with an elaborate gift certificate entitling her to trade him in for two twenties.

  Sam got pretty drunk and went out the next week and bought a silver Porsche. He said it was his present to himself.

  Pix seemed to be reading Faith's mind. “ He bought the car and I knew something was going on, but he didn 't want to talk about it. It looked ridiculous—our two cars in the driveway side by side—me the big clunky Land Rover, Sam the sleek Porsche. I tried to talk to him about it. After all, I had turned forty last year—very quietly.

  “I knew the signs. I read books. Midlife crisis, all that, so I thought I'd try to change, too—bought a lot of lingerie and even tried some of the Total Woman stuff, you know getting rid of the kids and welcoming him home dressed in Saran Wrap and nothing else, but we just laughed too hard. I knew everything would be all right and decided I would just go on as always. Pretend that nothing was the matter. Sex was still good. I wasn't complaining and neither was he.”

  Faith wondered if all minister's wives had to listen to this sort of confession, and tried to look mature and worldly, as if she had the wives of accused murderers sitting at her kitchen table every day, pouring out the most intimate details of their marriages.

  “But if I had known it was Cindy, I would have killed her myself," said Pix vehemently, "Sam is a baby. He was too innocent for her and she must have been driving him crazy. I knew he was tense, but he said it was work. I knew it wasn't all work. There were a lot of unexplained late nights. It wasn't something I liked, but there it was.'' Faith reached over and took her hand. Pix gave it a squeeze and sat up straight.

  “Faith, marriage is taking turns," she said somewhat didactically. She was on her second mug of coffee cum brandy and her voice was assuming the authoritative tone Faith thought she herself should have. Who was supposed to be comforting whom ?

  “You go through so many stages. When the kids were little and driving me crazy, Sam would come home and pitch in with the wash or whatever. He was strong for me. Now it's my turn to be strong for him. I certainly wasn 't going to throw a perfectly good marriage out the window because he was feeling middle-aged and needed some reassurance. Remember that, Faith. Tom may not have an affair" (better not, thought Faith) "but there will be something, sometime.”

  Pix started to cry again. This time quietly and that was somehow more desperate than her earlier wails. The anger was gone and the fear was taking hold.

  “I've got to get back to the kids and I've got to find out what's going on. You've been a darling, Faith." Faith gave her a hug at the door.

  “Just remember, Pix, Tom and I are here for you any time of day or night—and for the kids, too. Whatever happens, just remember that. We're on your side." Faith felt rather proud of this speech. It sounded like something a minister's wife should say. Then Pix took the wind right out of her sails; in fact, she capsized the craft.

  “Faith! You think Sam is guilty!" She looked stunned.

  “ Of course I don't ! " said Faith immediately, realizing that in the back of her mind in fact she had believed Sam had killed Cindy in some crazed moment. She was as shocked at herself as Pix was. This was Sam and just because Dave would be off the hook now was no reason to think her obviously innocent neighbor, friend, and fellow parishioner was guilty. It looked as if she wasn't going to be able to abandon her investigation yet.

  “ Pix ! You must believe me ! I'm as sure of Sam's innocence as I am, well—of yours or mine!”

  Pix looked at her in the eye. "That's better," she said, then added, "but I wouldn 't be so sure of mine if I were you.”

  Faith gasped.

  “Just testing," Pix said wickedly.

  Faith closed the door and wondered if all her parish duties would end up making her feel like she'd just had one of her mother 's talking tos. In any case, she was not sure what she had done for Pix, though Pix had certainly opened her eyes on a few things. At least Faith had cheered her up; the Pix who left was quite different from the one who arrived. But then it might have been the brandy. Now the main thing to do was find out what sort of case the police had against Sam. She doubted that John Dunne would figuratively throw the cuffs on someone without pretty solid evidence.

  Tom called again at noon. The police were being terrifically considerate. MacIsaac was letting him stay with Sam and Dunne had just gone out to get them all some meatball subs to eat. Faith almost gagged. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.

  Dave had been released and was home sleeping. He had been tearfully relieved before discovering that Samhad been arrested, then he had burst out in an angry denunciation of Cindy. Nobody stopped him.

  Before he got off the phone, Tom told Faith that just after they had arrived at the station Sam had confessed that Cindy, parish Young People 's President and former record holder for perfect attendance at Sunday School, had been blackmailing him for several months.

  And they call New York "Sin City," Faith thought as she hung up.

  What had started out as a moment of sweet passion had rapidly turned into a nightmare of lust and a web of deceit for Sam. At least this is the way he thought of it. Faith thought it was an apt but harsh description when she had pieced the whole story together with what she learned from Pix, what Sam told Tom, and even a few details from Charley MacIsaac who couldn 't resist a snide comment about people who drove around in highly visible cars.

  Sam had offered to drive Cindy home after church one sunny June Sunday when she had complained of a sore ankle. Somehow the silver Porsche 'had ended up on one of the birch-lined dirt roads near town conservation land and somehow before too long Cindy and Sam were lying under the silver green leaves.

  Poor Cindy, thought Sam. She had had a rough time of it, losing her parents so young, and face it, Patricia and Robert were a bit stiff. Not like him. She told him she could talk to him, really talk to him, and thanked him with touching humility for what she hinted was the sublime sexual experience of her life.

  Sam didn't smoke, but he had wanted a cigarette as he lay nestled in the ferns with Cindy 's lovely head resting on his shoulder, her long dark hair spread down his chest entwined in the dark hair there—sure there were a few gray ones coming in, but that's what maturity meant.

  She made him feel seasoned, like fine-grained oak, not old. Hell, not old at all.

  By the next week he knew he was hooked. He couldn't stop thinking about her—the sunlight, the smells, the sex. But he didn 't call. She was a kid, or if not exactly a kid, she certainly was engaged to be married, and to som
eone Sam liked very much. Dave had been their babysitter and was like a member of the family.

  He pushed the whole thing from his mind and began to go up more often to the house in Maine. Each June as soon as school was over, Pix packed up the kids and the Land Rover and took off for their cottage on Penobscot Bay, where she spent the summer blissfully making beach plum jelly and raising money for the local ambulance corps.

  One Friday night in early July, when he went into the garage loaded with his L.L. Bean suitcase plus all the food Pix couldn't find on the island, there was Cindy in a halter top, shorts, and not much else sitting in the front seat of the car waiting for him.

  He stopped going to Maine as frequently, or rather he went, but it was further south, to motels in Old Orchard Beach and Ogunquit where they would make love feverishly, then eat lobster on the docks. He didn't know whether he was happy or not about the way things were going, but he knew he was alive. He also didn't know that while he slept Cindy had set the timer on her camera, artfully draped herself around him, and taken several shots which she neatly labeled with his initials, the date, and name of the motel.

  Toward the end of July, Cindy changed abruptly. Suddenly she began to make jokes. She started to call him "my old codger" and "Father Time," at first affectionately and then less so. When he was tired, she did not attempt to hide her annoyance. He was no longer the partner in control, the teacher, the wise veteran. He wasthe supplicant, the controlled. She would cancel dates at the last minute or demand to go back early. He wanted to end things, but for a long time could not bring himself to do it. The memory of the early days was still fresh and Pix was away. Cindy was company, if increasingly bad company.

  In early August he decided his nerves could not take it anymore. He was not cut out to cheat on his wife and he had intended all along to go to the island for two weeks. It was a logical time to break things off once and for all.

  But Cindy had no intention of breaking things off. She was getting a bit tired of him, she told him, but it was pleasant to have an older man take her to dinner occasionally and as for the sex, she liked to keep her hand in, so to speak. She had laughed mockingly at him. He was furious and his intentions of letting her down gently vanished. So did her lightly amused manner. After he had lost his temper and let her know just what a conniving bitch she was, she had told him in a few pithy sentences that if he ever tried to break off with her, Pix would know everything. Cindy had kept a record of the names and dates of every place they had gone. She said she had taken the carbons from the motels and places they ate on occasions when he was supposed to be out of town on client's business. "And I've got more than carbons on you, something more negative, let's say," she had threatened. She would also make sure his partners knew. Not that they would care much, but he would look like a fool, she said, " Which of course is exactly what you are, Mr. Goodwrench.”

  She had taunted him all fall, even phoning the house. Thursday afternoon she had called his office demanding that he take her to dinner. He called Pix with a feeble excuse and they had driven to Hawthorne-by-the-Sea. Sam had a theory that in big restaurants you were more anonymous, except in this one he forgot about the loudspeaker system they used when your table was ready. It had never occurred to him at any time with Cindy to use an alias. It would have been no use anyway, he realized later. She would just have had more to blackmail him over.

  They sat at one of the windows overlooking the ocean and watched the waves and the skyline of Boston shimmering in the distance. It should have been supremely romantic. Absentmindedly Sam bit into a popover, the house specialty. It tasted like sawdust. He looked at Cindy. She had ordered the most expensive things on the menu and was consuming her oysters Rockefeller with gusto. Sam felt like throwing up.

  “I can't live this way. I'm going to tell Pix myself.”

  “And what about your partners ? " Cindy asked mildly.

  “They screw around all the time. This isn't going to change anything, and even if it does, I don't care anymore," Sam said wearily.

  Cindy just smiled. It made him a whole lot more nervous than any of her threats.

  “Just think about it, Sammy. Really think about it. And I need some more wine to go with the lobster." He was home before midnight and slept with the blessed relief of someone about to be let out of jail. The next morning Cindy called the house at seven o'clock. Fortunately he happened to pick it up. "Hello, Sam, is Samantha there? This is Cindy. There 's something I want to tell her—and show her." Sam's throat closed and at first he could not speak. Stupidly, of all the things he thought she could do to him, this was the one that he had never considered. His kids. Perhaps he thought she had had some humanity after all. Defeated, he said, "All right, what do you want?"

  “ I'll tell you on the lovely drive we're going to take this morning."

  “I'm afraid today is impossible." He was trying to keep his voice neutral. This was a call, just a routine business call for all anyone sitting around the table eating Cap 'n Crunch and Lucky Charms could tell.

  She cut him off. "Nothing's impossible, Sam, as you've just learned. See you at the corner in an hour. Maybe we should go to the beach ? “

  Sam hung up. He wanted to kill her, and later that day when he heard someone had, he would have given anything to undo it.

  Of course Sam and Cindy had been seen Friday and all those months previously. Millicent knew.

  And Jenny Moore knew.

  She had come to the Fairchilds' with her mother late in the afternoon, just as Tom was returning from what was becoming an increasingly familiar police station. They had stopped by to invite Faith and Tom—and Ben—to spend the following day at their place in New Hampshire. "The camp" Patricia called it, though Faith knew it bore as much resemblance to the camps of her youth as a Mercedes to a Volkswagen Beetle.

  “This is our last weekend before shutting everything up and we plan to spend it quietly. It would be nice to have you with us. Robert hopes to get one last sail in if the weather holds. So bring your long johns."

  “Oh, please come," Jenny chimed in, "Then I can play with Benjamin all day ! “

  Faith looked at Tom. " It's up to you, sweetheart, or rather up to your sermon.”

  Tom tried very hard to keep Saturdays clear for Faith and Benjamin. It was his day off, if a minister can be said to have a day off, but in practice he was sometimes hastily polishing the next day 's sermon. Faith couldn't imagine writing one of these things every week and heartily admired him for doing so.

  “There seems to be a lot of food for thought these days," Tom said glumly. "And the sermons are almost writing themselves. There should be no problem about going."

  “ Good. That's settled then," Patricia said, " We'll see you sometime in the morning ? “

  Tom took Patricia outside to get her opinion on the wisdom of fall pruning for a line of straggly yews and Faith and Jenny sat at the kitchen table consuming oatmeal cookies and drinking black currant tea. Benjamin had stopped his post-nap fussing and was swinging placidly in the wind-up swing.

  Jenny Moore was a small, slender girl with pretty brown eyes and what used to be described in another era as "nut-brown hair." In other words, not many people would have looked at her twice with Cindy in the room.

  It was Jenny who brought up the subject of Sam and Cindy.

  “You just don't know what she was like, Mrs. Fairchild. Sometimes I think she wasn't really normal. She used to talk a lot about all the guys she had. I couldn't believe it about Mr. Miller at first. I thought it was just Cindy boasting again. She did a lot of that too, but after awhile, she knew too much about the family. Like when they were going to be away in Maine and stuff. Samantha is my best friend and I haven't been able to go to their house for months. I was afraid I'd see Mr. Miller. How could he do that to them ? "

  “I don 't know, Jenny. I think he was pretty upset about it and wanted to end it. He just got in over his head. It's no excuse, I know, but sometimes even older people do pretty dum
b things."

  “ Yeah, but Cindy. I mean, couldn't he have picked somebody better ? “

  “I think she picked him," Faith said gently.

  Jenny had been dangling an Ambi mirror block in front of Benjamin's pudgy face and said, "Poor Mr. Miller."

  “Jenny," questioned Faith, "when I was talking to you at the house I had the feeling you weren 't telling me everything. Was there anything else besides this business with Sam ? "

  “No," said Jenny quickly. Too quickly? "This was what was bothering me. I couldn 't tell anyone because of Samantha."

  “So there wasn 't anyone else Cindy might have been seeing ? "

  “Well, I think there was someone new, but it was pretty recent. She was still at the hinting around stage. That everyone would be surprised if they knew and how no one was without sin—I thought that was a funny way to put it. Almost like it was a priest or something. Oh my gosh, Mrs. Fairchild, I'm sorry." Jenny put her hand to her mouth.

  “That's all right, Jenny, don 't worry. I know Tom has plenty of sins, but Cindy wasn't one of them. Of course there are other clergymen in town, or in the greater Boston area for that matter. Cindy didn 't always stay close to home, did she ? " Faith mused.

  “No," sighed Jenny.

  This is going to be harder than I imagined, thought Faith. And it always looks so easy in the books. Of course it would be ridiculous to think that Tom ever had the slightest notion of Cindy except as something that crawled out from under a rock.

  If Tom noticed the two of them eyeing him with particular intensity when he walked in the back door with Patricia a few minutes later, he didn't let on.

  The Moores left and the doorbell rang.

  “Does life seem to be taking on a disturbingly frantic quality?" Faith asked. "Not that I 'm complaining."

  “I'11 let you know after I see who it is," Tom replied.